A Thousand Bookmarks

What his sister left behind was a single notebook of thoughts on the anime she watched and the novels she read.

Minato Shinozaki, twenty-three. At the office where he is one year out of school, nothing is ever added to his score. Only mistakes are recorded, and the best day is the one on which nothing happened. He leaves after hours, takes the same train, walks the same street home. He has never once wondered what kind of trees are planted along that street.

It has been a few months since Shiori, his sister, three years older, died in an accident. In life, she was the kind of person who talked eagerly at the dinner table about the anime she had watched. Minato always answered, “So what good does that do?” The notebook came out of her room. Inside, records of what she had watched alternate with a diary in which she looked at the real world through the words she had found there.

He begins working through the titles the notebook names, one at a time. The reason is simple: if he watches what she watched, he might reach the view she was looking at. And before long, the walk to work the next morning stops looking the way it looked the day before.

Was the time he spent on stories an escape from reality? Or was it preparation for loving that reality more deeply?